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25.3.13

What Extremely Successful People did During Their 20's

Martha Stewart

Martha Stewart was a stockbroker for the firm of Monness, Williams, and Sidel, the original Oppenheimer & Co.

Before her name was known by every American household, Martha Stewart actually worked on Wall Street for five years as a stockbroker. Before that, she was a model, booking clients from Unilever to Chanel.

"There were very few women at the time on Wall Street … and people talked about this glass ceiling, which I never even thought about," Stewart said in an interview with PBS' MAKERS series. "I never considered myself an unequal and I think I got a very good education being a stockbroker."

In 1972, Stewart left Wall Street to be a stay-at-home mom. A year later, she started a catering business.

Mark Cuban

Mark Cuban was a bartender in Dallas.

At age 25, Cuban had graduated from Indiana University and had moved to Dallas. He started out as a bartender, then a salesperson for a PC software retailer. He actually got fired because he wanted to go close a deal rather than open a store in the morning. That helped inspire him to open his first business, MicroSolutions.
“When I got to Dallas, I was struggling — sleeping on the floor with six guys in a three-bedroom apartment,” Cuban writes in his book “How to Win at the Sport of Business.” “I used to drive around, look at the big houses, and imagine what it would be like to live there and use that as motivation.”

Ralph Lauren was a sales assistant at Brooks Brothers.

He was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, New York, but changed his name at the age of 15. He went on to study business at Baruch College and served in the Army until the age of 24 when he left to work for Brooks Brothers.

At 26, Lauren decided to design a wide European-styled tie, which eventually led to an opportunity with Neiman Marcus. The next year, he launched the label "Polo."

JK Rowling came up with the idea for the Harry Potter series on a train.

In 1990, Rowling was 25 years old when she came up with the idea for Harry Potter during a delayed four-hour train ride.

She started writing the first book that evening, but it took her years to actually finish it. While working as a secretary for the London office of Amnesty International, Rowling was fired for daydreaming too much about Harry Potter and her severance check would help her focus on writing for the next few years.

During these years, she got married, had a daughter, got divorced, and was diagnosed with clinical depression before finally finishing the book in 1995. It was published in 1997

Lloyd Blankfein was an unhappy lawyer.

Blankfein didn't take the typical route to finance. He actually started out as a lawyer. He got his law degree from Harvard at age 24, then took a job as an associate at law firm Donovan Leisure.

"I was as provincial as you could be, albeit from Brooklyn, the province of Brooklyn," Blankfein told William Cohen at Fortune Magazine.

At the time, he was a heavy smoker and occasional gambler. Despite the fact that he was on the partner track at the firm, he decided to switch to investment banking, joining J. Aron at the age of 27.

Jay-Z was already in the rap scene, but was 'relatively anonymous.'

Born Shawn Carter, Jay Z grew up in a housing project in Brooklyn, New York and became known as "Jay Z" at the age of 20. For the next few years he appeared alongside various other rappers, but "remained relatively anonymous" until he founded the record label Roc-A-Fella Records at the age of 27 with two other friends. The same year, Jay Z released his first album, "Reasonable Doubt."

Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million users.

Mark Zuckerberg had been hard at work on Facebook for five years by the time he hit age 25. In that year — 2009 — the company turned cash positive for the first time and hit 300 million users. He was excited at the time, but said it was just the start, writing on Facebook that "the way we think about this is that we're just getting started on our goal of connecting everyone."

The next year, he was named "Person of the Year" by Time magazine.

Tim Allen was arrested and served the next two years in Federal prison.

While working as a stand up comedian, Allen was arrested at 25 in an airport for possessing more than 650 grams of cocaine. He pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges and received two years instead of life in prison for providing the names of other dealers.

The experience was so bad that he was forced to turn himself around. He told Esquire, "When I went to jail, reality hit so hard that it took my breath away, took my stance away, took my strength away. I was there buck naked, humiliated ... this is a metaphor. My ego had run off. Your ego is the biggest coward."

Allen became known to the public for his role on the sitcom "Home Improvement," which premiered in 1991.

Richard Branson had already started the Virgin Records record label.

At age 20, Branson opened his first record shop, then a studio at 22 and launched the label at 23. By 30, his company was international.

Those early years were tough, he told Entrepreneur: "I remember them vividly. It's far more difficult being a small-business owner starting a business than it is for me with thousands of people working for us and 400 companies. Building a business from scratch is 24 hours, 7 days a week, divorces, it's difficult to hold your family life together, it's bloody hard work and only one word really matters — and that's surviving."

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt was building a deep background in computer science.

Schmidt spent six years as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, earning a masters and Ph.D. at 27 for early work in networking computers and managing distributed software development.

He spent those summers working at the famed Xerox PARC labs, which helped create the computer workstation as we know it. There, he met the founder of Sun Microsystems, where he had his first corporate job.

In his early years as a programmer, "all of us never slept at night because computers were faster at night."

Billionaire businessman Roman Abramovich had already set up and liquidated at least 20 companies.

As a child, Abramovich was an orphan and raised by his uncle, and by the age of 21, entered the black market through money he had received from his wife's parents. His companies eventually became more legalized businesses in the early 1990s, by which time Abramovich had been involved with at least 20 companies.

At 26, he was arrested for theft of government property, and by the age of 35 became Governor of Chukotka in Russia.

He maintains that he was innocent in that early case, saying, "There were problems with the banking system … at the time when the refinery discovered they haven’t got the money, whilst I was under arrest, they received the money and I was released."